LOVE TO THE COAT OF ARMS

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Russia is experiencing an era of heraldic renaissance. Arms holders-2006 - retired military, officials with career prospects, businessmen with patriarchal views. Questionnaires of future armigers - owners of arms - for the chief ...

Russia is experiencing an era of heraldic renaissance. Arms holders-2006 - retired military, officials with career prospects, businessmen with patriarchal views.

Questionnaires of future armigers - owners of arms - for the chief artist of the Russian Heraldic College Valery Lysenko as cryptograms for the characters of The Da Vinci Code. In two months, he must translate into the language of symbols the biography, character and desires of the client, who is uncomfortable with the absence of a crown, a shield on the fireplace and a flag raised by a servant over a country cottage in honor of the arrival of the owner. Before coding the customer's personal story, Lysenko studies his answers in the section "The main event of your life and the motto." For breeders of greyhounds, a married couple from Chelyabinsk, it is important that an elite female whelp in the fall. The Dutchman Rikard Holberg, a descendant of an old family, and his Russian wife, the mother of six children, are aimed at "increasing the population." An entrepreneur from Dagestan from the doorstep offers the artist "a suitcase of money for an eagle in a hat and with a dagger." Having read a lecture to a businessman about heraldry birds not familiar with horse riding, Lysenko loses a lucrative order.

The collective portrait of the Russian armiger is a prosperous family man, a wealthy man aged 35-50. “Usually, a coat of arms for a businessman over the age of forty in the Urals, the Far East, in Moscow is an expensive toy bought for self-satisfaction,” the observation of Alexander Vershinin, owner of the personal heraldry website Blazon Stone. Modern candidates for armigers order family symbols in private firms or colleges for $1000-1500. Until 1917, the General Armorial of the Noble Families of the All-Russian Empire contained about 6,000 coats of arms. The number of coats of arms in modern Russia is determined not by their merits to the homeland, but by purses and romanticism, and ancient art is driven by the Internet and the love of subordinates for superiors (the coat of arms is a fashionable gift).

In 2003, Russian heraldry received a sign of approval from above: from the presidential decree "On measures to develop local self-government in the Russian Federation", mayors and governors learned that it was time for villages, districts, cities to have their own look, and began to draw the letter "X" on the territorial emblems in Khovrin or hens with five eggs in Oseevo, Shchelkovsky district.

“Coat of arms is a multilayer coding system,” Alexei Zhuravkov, chairman of the Siberian Heraldic College, delves into family annals. “Ancestors put information in them for their descendants, and after a couple of centuries, the heirs, reading the semantic sheets, feel like treasure hunters.”

Composer Andrei Eshpay and an official from the Chuvash village of Mariinsky Posad, Alexei Shumov, received family symbols with equal honors. “My countrymen have long argued that I am worthy of being a coat of arms, but they did not convince me,” Eshpay is embarrassed. - I do not think that Rachmaninoff and Tchaikovsky were armigers. Of course, any award is pleasant to a creative person, but all the same, I perceive the coat of arms as a kind of phantom that exists independently of the owner.

Shumov acquired a personal coat of arms after being elected head of the district. At the “inauguration” ceremony, the subordinates explained to the former Chuvash builder that the figure of a lion and the color of the Tsivil oak on the family heraldic sign is a parallel between the great families: his, Alexei Shumov, and Tsar Alexander II, in honor of whose wife the village was named in 1856.

By 2005, about 20 companies had opened in Moscow, supplying customers with personal and corporate symbols. Among the first clients of the capital's heraldry was a bank clerk Gorankov from Okhansk, Perm region, who paid a substantial amount for the coat of arms of his father, Nikolai Nikolaevich.

The guy's dad, a 50-year-old provincial official with a biologist's education, a descendant of the Gorankovs' workers, is the only owner of arms in a city with a population of 8,000. Nikolay Nikolaevich did not immediately discern the features of the patriarch, the founder of the family, in himself - he got used to the image of an overturned azure point and gold pawed crosses for three years.

Master of Heraldic Sciences, artist Valery Lysenko finished work on the 152nd or 154th coat of arms last week - the master does not remember the exact number. Work on one symbol takes from 2 to 6 months. Another customer is the prosecutor of the military garrison. Pointing with a pencil at the codes, Lysenko retells the history of the prosecutor's family and adds: “The world is ruled by signs and symbols, but not by the word and the law. What exactly is a coat of arms? Protection of the name, profession, family and children. And where will they attach his image: on a bottle of vodka, paper for correspondence or glasses - minor details.

The Russian Heraldic Board made Chechen President Alu Alkhanov, leader of the Ukrainian Party of Regions Viktor Yanukovych, artists Gennady Khazanov and Iosif Kobzon, several hundred entrepreneurs, military personnel, and officials into armigers. According to Lysenko, personal symbols in our country are more decent than territorial ones. “Have you seen the coat of arms of the Republic of Sakha? A rider on a horse with a lowered tail? — The artist is looking for the right page in the heraldic collection. - It's not in the book - it should be in the comics! Loose stool in a horse. Or take the emblems of Russia, Moscow. Absolutely illiterate: unarmed eagle - no claws, beak, unprotected horse without gender. It's a shame that Ukraine, Moldova have full-fledged state emblems, but Russia does not.

In the summer, the Russian Heraldic College published another matrikul - a collection of coats of arms listing 4,000 territorial and more than 1,000 personal symbols. Previously, the St. Petersburg office of the Heraldic Council under the President of the Russian Federation received 350 sketches a year for registration, in five months of 2006, according to the executive secretary of the service Gleb Kalashnikov, the regions have already sent 600 applications. For the third year, the only state heraldic organization in Russia - the Presidential Council - accepts for examination, in addition to administrative, civil coats of arms, but does not keep records of them. In a non-estate society, titles do not complain, and personal heraldry does not have legislation that defines the forms and rules of its existence. An absurd situation: there are family symbols in the country - colleges registered by the Ministry of Justice, private firms without respite fulfill the orders of armigers - and at the same time they do not exist, since there is no legal status.

Novosibirsk heraldists, without waiting for decrees from Moscow, reanimated the pre-revolutionary "Table of Ranks" and since last spring they have been handing out coats of arms: to academicians, officials for labor successes, owners of "family estates" - mansions with an area of ​​at least 1000 square meters - for a fee. “We have compiled a list of modern ranks worthy of receiving a family symbol,” says Aleksey Zhuravkov, chairman of the Siberian Heraldic College. The elite list included governors with deputies, generals and university rectors. Outside the Urals and in the Far East, the armigers defend the sketches of coats of arms as a work of art and believe that the state should intervene in civil symbols - to fix each family coat of arms with a government decree.

"Like this? Will I have to ask Fradkov to register my personal mark?” - Igor Kleimenov, an entrepreneur from the Nizhny Novgorod region, the owner of three hardware stores, does not understand the offer of Siberians. At the top of his personal coat of arms is a dog stuck between the horns of an unidentified animal, at the bottom is the motto "We'll break through." Igor reads the symbols like divination cards: “The dog is about devotion to friends. Horns - to the ability to endure troubles. The coat of arms of Kleimenov hangs over the TV in the living room. The heraldic sign for Igor is a memory of military service in Germany, a youthful passion for history and a detail of the situation that his friends do not yet have.

The idea is to count the Russian armigers, endorse coats of arms with mottos: “I’ll die, I won’t change”, “Know the measure”, “A shod horse walks more confidently”, “When money sings, the muses are silent” (we give examples of real works of the Russian Heraldic College and the Blazon Stone society) with the help of the prime minister is an interesting initiative, but in the coming years personal heraldry and the government will not intermarry. The recommendation does not seem reasonable to the Heraldic Council under the President of Russia. The service, created by Boris Yeltsin in June 1999 and responsible for state, territorial symbols, refers personal coats of arms to issues of self-expression of citizens. “At the level of legislation, it is absurd to interfere in a hobby or give recommendations to a businessman who wants to have, in addition to expensive watches, a family coat of arms,” Gleb Kalashnikov, executive secretary of the council, objects to Siberians.

Heraldic center "Derzhava" was opened in Moscow in 2002. Clientele - individuals, firms, ministries of agriculture and health, Rostekhnadzor, judicial department at the Supreme Court of Russia. Families order personal coats of arms, companies fill out questionnaires to receive a corporate badge. The director of Derzhava, Elena Kozina, is surprised that every year commercial and government organizations yearn more for the Soviet past with competitions and medals, and people yearn for strong families. Remembering the customers, Kozina is frank: before they were approached by the presidents of firms selling nuts or medicines, the owners of regional enterprises with requests to make a flag with a family symbol: “I want it like in Putin’s residence: the owner is in a mansion - a banner on the roof, I leave - the banner is removed.” Other armigers - from the nobles of the Next generation - demanded to make a baroque coat of arms, painting the shield with all the colors of the rainbow, contrary to the "four-color" heraldry norms. It turns out that in 2004-2006, the head of the Russian Imperial House, Grand Duchess Maria Vladimirovna, managed to award about 60 generals of our non-estate state with the Order of St. Nicholas the Wonderworker: the first degree elevates the owner to hereditary nobility, the second - to personal. Between themselves, the heraldists call the grand duke's chosen ones "what cannot be," but they willingly create coats of arms for them.

Experts liken the armigers-2006 to butterfly collectors: without recognition of personal heraldry at the state level, their coats of arms are nothing more than expensive but useless candy wrappers. Alexander Kurov, creator of the Excursus to Heraldry website, advises Russians to study the experience of Germany, where the legal protection of the coat of arms is guaranteed by the twelfth paragraph of the Civil Code. The coat of arms can be notarized as an attribute of the name, forbidding its use without the consent of the owner.

We have a name, a surname - ordinary words, and heraldry - the unhindered collection of "herbarium" under conditions of natural selection. The fresh family coat of arms of businessman Viktor Shirokov is also about natural selection: on the shield, in a black field, there is a silver human head, two candles and the worn mouth of a wolf. The silver-azure splendor is crowned with the motto Bestiae Ad Hominem ("from beast to man").